Sunday, June 30, 2013

Where I’m Coming From

Below is a short narrative I presented to the Environment Program at Loyola this past April. We begin each of our monthly meetings with a brief autobiography from one of the faculty members affiliated with the program; I've found these to be very inspiring and illuminating. I thought I'd post mine here.

I grew up in the
woods of northern Michigan, foraging for morel mushrooms, catching bass in
crystal clear inland lakes, and walking the lakeshore after storms sifting through assorted amalgams of plastic six-pack holders, driftwood, dead balloons, beach glass, and glacial rocks.

The place I call home, where my parents
bought a small wedge of land in 1991, sits directly on the boundary of Sleeping
Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: 35 miles of sandy beaches, steep cliffs, and
rolling juniper dotted dunes that back up into pine and aspen transition zones,
that then lead to deep rolling hills of maple and beech forests.

When I was in high
school I watched some of my favorite hillsides get logged, cleared, and built
on: gaudy luxury summer mansions thrown up double-time, echoing disjointed
architectural dreams from other regions, distant coasts.

Around that time I
read Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and I relished
fantasies of sabotaging the Caterpillar earthmovers that decimated the giant
northern red oaks I loved to climb.

A couple years
later, at a small liberal arts college in southern Michigan, where I majored in
philosophy and English, I was introduced to the writings of Gary Snyder and
Barry Lopez, and I began to draw connections between bioregionalism and
poetics—or how we tell stories about the places we live, and in turn how
habitats and ecosystems get into the stories we tell.

But one of my best
if also hardest courses in college was a biology class called Michigan Flora—thank
goodness for a liberal arts common curriculum. There were two of us students in
the class (!), and we spent hours seeking out and identifying various species of
plants, trees, and shrubs in the surrounding scrub forests and roadside ditches
next to vast cornfields. I took this scientific knowledge home with me the next summer, and my
sense of the place I called home became even more ingrained.

Later in college I
started spending the summers in Wyoming, where I worked as a river guide on the
Snake River within the wild, 27-mile corridor between Yellowstone and Grand
Teton National Park called the J.D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway. This was a
beautiful area, but the lodgepole pines did nothing for me compared with the
lusciously soft white pines back in Michigan, and the tourism industry of the
American West made my woes about northern Michigan tourists seem quaint. My second
summer in Wyoming, I also worked a stint on a trail crew for the National
Forest Service, and got to know a good portion of the Bridger-Teton National
Forest, clearing brush and maintaining rugged routes.

After college I was
still drawn to this region, in part due to early forays into the literature of
the American West, and I decided I wanted to move to a mountain town. After
working another river rafting job in Arizona for a season, I found my way to
Bozeman, Montana, where I had been accepted into a Master’s program in English.
Every minute that I wasn’t reading for graduate seminars, working on papers, or
teaching freshman writing, I obsessively fly-fished in the creeks and rivers
that wind around the Gallatin Valley and eventually form the Missouri River.

In graduate school
my interests in philosophy merged into what in English is called “critical
theory,” and concepts from this interdisciplinary node shaped my Master’s
thesis, which analyzed the strange language of ‘Nature’ in texts ranging from
Terry Tempest Williams’s stark desert notes to glossy magazine advertisements for sport utility vehicles. I drew from eco-feminism, semiotics, and deconstruction in
order to complicate the as-if simple messages of landscape, environment, and
region embedded in literary and cultural texts of the American West.

But meanwhile, as I
was working on my MA and fishing the rivers, something else weird was
happening. I had taken a part-time job at the Gallatin Field Airport, eight
miles outside of town, with the intention of simply making a few hundred extra
bucks a month to cover my rent. But as it goes with some part-time jobs in
life, I started volunteering to cover my co-workers’ shifts, and in a matter of
months I learned all the various parts of the operation: loading bags, de-icing
the planes, emptying the onboard toilet, operating the jet-bridge, pushing back
the plane to the taxiway, creating itineraries for passengers...soon I was
working nearly full-time at the airport, strange late and early hours that let
me keep up with my studies (not to mention my fishing regimen).

Over time the
bizarre environment of the airport mesmerized me, including all the ways that
people were syphoned in and out of this signature region via the eerily generic
terminal building. I worked at the airport during the state-of-exception called
9/11, and I watched the norms of air travel morph and twist with the swinging
politics of that time.

When I finished my
Master’s program, I turned in my United Airlines uniform and headed West once
again, this time to Davis, California, where I had been accepted into a PhD
program in English—this was the place to be for studying eccentric topics where
nature and culture collided. At UC Davis, under the Pacific Flyway where every
day the paths of migrating birds and Air Force cargo planes intermingle, I
continued to study 20th-century American literature, environmental aesthetics,
and critical theory.

At Davis I worked
as a Research Assistant for my professor Timothy Morton as he wrote his books Ecology Without Nature and The
Ecological Thought. Tim’s ideas about the construction of Nature capital
‘N’ in literary history had a profound influence on me, and consequently inspired
me to ask different sorts of questions about the roles of literature, poetics,
and narrative with respect to concepts of environment.

All the while, my
airport work experiences were simmering in my brain. It occurred to me somewhat
gradually that I had spent lots of time in a particularly rich—if also
particularly fraught—kind of ecotone.

I started to notice
weird airport scenes in a wide range of literary and cultural texts, and
started to keep records of these strange instances, and how they depended on
notions of place, space, and environmental awareness (or not). I ended up
writing my doctoral dissertation on this topic, which then formed the basis for
my book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight,
which I wrote during my first couple years at Loyola University New Orleans.

Over the past four
years at Loyola I’ve continued to write about air travel, always coming from an
oblique environmental sensibility. And I’ve started to write a book about my
home, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which I’m thinking of as a
sort of 21st-century Walden—modestly place-based, but rife with larger
questions and puzzles about what nature means in contemporary American culture.

My interests in
environment filter into all of my courses, in the sense that the
detail-oriented kind of literary reading I teach is translatable to ecological
perception: how different organisms and habitats interrelate and co-shape one
another.

In a more literal
sense, the course I taught a couple years ago called “Environmental Theory” was
a philosophical adventure (for the students as well as for me), and I look
forward to teaching another iteration of the course in the near future. Next
semester, I am teaching a Literature and Environment course, and I’m very
excited to introduce students to a range of ways that literary texts rely on,
invent, and explore notions of environment.

I’m currently
working as co-editor for a series of essays and books called Object Lessons: these
are pithy essays and beautifully designed short books on single objects and the
lessons they hold. My collaborator on this series is Ian Bogost from the Media
Studies Center at Georgia Tech. He’s bringing what we might call the
technological angle to the project, and I see myself as bringing an
environmental or more ecological angle to the series. In brief, we’re hoping to
create a series that is equally appealing to media
studies scholars and naturalists—a series that productively blurs and
challenges the nature/culture divide.

Ideally Object
Lessons will be a long running series of essays and books covering all sorts of
different things, such as honey, hurricane, heliotrope, Velcro,
volvaria, copper wire, cruise ship, cilium, silt—the
list of possible topics is quite literally endless, and cuts across the
boundaries of human invention and natural dissemination. My hope is that by
focusing on single things, in succinct and accessible essays, we can then
better appreciate how all these things coexist (and when they don't) in this world, or in this life, or whatever it is that we mean when we call on ‘environment’ to do
rhetorical, moral, or political work.